Samuel crashed through the forest, pushing himself into and through denser and denser underbrush. Clawing branches and thorned bushes scratched and tore at his clothing and skin, causing droplets of blood to appear at some of the cuts. What little remained of his burned shirt was practically ripped off his body.

He knew he couldn't outrun Oscar for long. He could hear the zombie behind him, Oscar’s pursuit growing louder and closer with each passing second.

The massive redwood trees towered above him, their branches stretching towards the sky so far above and their canopies so thick that Samuel felt like a tiny intruder on a sacred space. Samuel dodged between the trunks, using them as cover and hoping to lose Oscar in the maze of trees, mosses, and otherworldly mushrooms.

Oscar was relentless. The zombie moved masterfully through the forest, his decay magic allowing him to seemingly melt through the tightest spaces, branches and leaves falling brittle and breaking in his wake.

Samuel was running out of options.

He caught sight of a massive fallen tree, its trunk split and hollowed out by years of rot and some kind of insect. With no other options left, he scrambled into the hollow of the trunk, pushing deeper and deeper into its core and up its length. The forgotten webbing of spiders clutched to Samuel’s hands and hair as he pushed himself through, but the adrenaline coursing through his veins let him forget his fear of tiny wriggling things.

Behind him, the sickening sound of wood splintering and cracking rang out. Oscar had caught up to him and was tearing into tree with his bare hands.

“Give me a break, man,” Samuel muttered, pressing himself through a particularly tight squeeze.

The wood beneath him cracked and then gave way.

Samuel tumbled down into a small cavern of networking tunnels of darkness, his body crashing onto a bed of rotted wood and jagged rocks. He groaned in pain, his eyes flicking around. The roots of trees hung from the ceiling, some mosses giving off the soft glow of bioluminescence. The weak light reflected off a sea of thousands of beady black eyes regarding him. Samuel realized with growing horror that he was trapped in a den of spiders. They not only covered the ground and walls around him but hung suspended from the ceiling on lines of silk.

He tried jumping to his feet and yelped, his ankle caught under a rock. He pulled it free and flexed it, feeling the pain of a strain and the swelling under his skin already start to build. He brushed phantom insects off his body even though they hadn’t had a chance to climb up onto him. The smallest of the spiders’ bodies were as big as baseballs with some as large as bowling balls. Webs and sacs of eggs clung to the ceiling and floor. They were hesitant to approach Samuel, though, and Samuel yelled at them to stay back.

Samuel shuddered with fear and revulsion, resting his body’s weight on his uninjured leg.

“Why does there always have to be spiders?” Samuel whispered to himself, feeling the full weight of his fear of tiny wriggling things come back to him.

As one, the spiders’ attention shifted away from Samuel to the ceiling far above him. From within the hole Samuel had fallen through, Oscar peered down on the scene with softly glowing eyes and an impassive face.

Samuel limped away from beneath the hole, cautiously wading into the throng of spiders and praying none of them would attack him. Goosebumps crawled from his head to his toes, every little hair on his body sending signals to his brain to shriek and brush off whatever was touching him. But the spiders’ attention was fixed on Oscar. The zombie deftly hung from the hole with one arm and dropped to the spot on the ground Samuel had occupied only moments ago.

The purple tendrils of decay magic pushing out from Oscar’s body tasted the air, curious.

“Hello, little ones,” Oscar said to the gathered crowd of arachnids.

One of the spiders crawled forward, its eight limbs skittering with precise movement. It raised its head to greet one of the purple worms. As soon as its feelers connected to the purple magic the bug began its inevitable decay, blackening and drying into a husk of itself.

All at once, the cavern of spiders swept forward. They parted around Samuel as if he was a stone in a river, crashing into Oscar in waves of death. The bugs died by the hundreds, throwing themselves vainly against the zombie pulsing with decay magic. Oscar swiped his own hands at some of the larger spiders—the ones that took ever so slightly longer to give in to decay—and tore them apart. Only some of the spider’s fangs sank into Oscar’s legs before they turned to dust. Samuel wasn’t sure how effective any potential venom would be against the undead.

Samuel limped slowly backward, forgotten about for the moment, as more spiders crawled into the cavern through a dozen networking tunnels.

Fear was forgotten as awe took its place as tens of thousands of arachnids streamed into the space to attack Oscar. Samuel picked the largest of the caverns they came through and trudged into it, carefully favoring his one good leg to not upset is sprain. He tentatively placed his feet in whatever spot he could avoid the spiders, doing his best not to accidentally step on one and cause their ire.

It was curious, seeing so many spiders pass him by to assault Oscar. Samuel had always thought of the spiders as evil little things, hiding in the dark, waiting for an opportunity to feed on life.

But no, as disgusted as Samuel was by the bugs, they were also living beings. And the enemy of Samuel’s enemy was, if not a friend, not an evil little thing. Decay and the undead were seemingly just as big a threat to the spiders as they were to Samuel.

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Ahead, a dark shape the size of a refrigerator lumbered towards Samuel. Samuel pushed himself against the side of the small cavern wall, making himself as small as possible. The shape came closer, revealing itself in the dim light to be another spider. Venom glistened and dropped from dark fangs and eight intelligent eyes paused to study Samuel.

Samuel held his breath, dismayed at the loud thumping of his heart against his ribcage. He willed his heart to settle down.

The spider’s eyes slid off Samuel and focused back on the cavern Oscar was in. It rushed away with speed at odds with its size. Samuel let his breath out slowly before moving forward again.

He wanted out. Back up into the light.

He moved through darkness illuminated only by faintly glowing mosses, limping on his sprained ankle. He scanned the walls and ceilings for anything he could use to grab purchase and climb, but nothing felt promising. He moved deeper and the spiders grew sparser.

The distant scurrying of spiders made Samuel’s skin crawl, but for now, they seemed to be giving him a wide berth. The hanging mosses cast an eerie glow on the damp walls, but there was no sign of a way out.

Just as thoughts entered his mind of being doomed to wander the underground labyrinth forever, he caught sight of a tunnel filled with a greater light in the distance. It was the first sign of hope he'd seen since he’d fallen into the caverns underneath the forest.

He hobbled forward, ignoring the ache in his ankle, and soon entered a room with a small pool of water at its center. The water was clear and still, reflecting the glowing moss above. Fungi clung to the rocks at the water’s edge, glowing brighter than the mosses with some sort of magic or bioluminescence. He wanted to harvest the mushrooms, thinking they may have some useful properties, but had nowhere to store them and worried that even touching them could prove deadly. Just under the water’s surface, Samuel spotted an underwater cave, leading away into the unknown.

Unfortunately, the dry part of room was a dead end.

He looked back the way he had come. He couldn’t see or hear anything pursuing, but he refused to backtrack into the spider den or where Oscar could be lurking.

Samuel hesitated for a moment more, but the tunnel felt like his only chance of escape. He stepped carefully into the water, wincing as the cold seeped through his clothes. While he most of his body shivered at the cold, he relaxed as many of his aches and pains of the last day went numb. He took a deep breath and dove down toward the tunnel, promising himself he was only going to take a look.

The glowing moss swirled down the length of the tunnel, making it feel like a portal to another dimension. He swam into the tunnel. It was a tight fit, and Samuel worried he wouldn’t be able to squeeze through if it got much smaller. There was an exit at the far end of the tunnel, but it would be a long swim. He only kicked a few feet further into the tunnel to confirm his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him before he pushed back out and resurfaced. He breathed out a shaky breath, feeling the cold getting to his bones.

He heard it then again.

The skittering of spiders.

The muffled sounds of violence.

Samuel took a breath and swam into the tunnel.

His lungs started to scream at him to take a breath, and Samuel only dug his hands into the glowing moss to pull himself forward. The moss was his only guide, and he clung to it as if his life depended on it.

And it did.

At last, he burst through the end of the tunnel and pulled himself free into a dark chasm of water devoid of the glowing moss. Dark depths gave way to an inky blackness below, and Samuel wasn’t sure how far the underground lake went down. He kicked up, following the path of his bubbles toward a surface he hoped existed.

He felt like his lungs were going to burst, and he had no way of knowing when he would hit the surface. The edges of his vision were darkening. The kicks of his legs slowing.

Just when he thought he couldn't hold on any longer and his body would betray him by breathing in gulps of water, his head broke the surface. He sucked at the air, greedily filling his body and lungs with the desperately needed oxygen. As his eyes struggled to adjust to the greater darkness, a single source of light illuminated a tiny island in the middle of the lake.

It felt like a mirage, a floating island within an endless void of darkness. It was dotted with the glowing fungi. A twisted root structure reached all the way down from the ceiling above, piercing the rocky outcrop and creating a natural canopy and fence around the island.

Samuel swam for the once source of light.

His arms and legs ached from the effort and he shivered from the cold, but he went slow, afraid to disturb the water too much. The darkness was all around him, and he couldn't shake the feeling of being watched by something ominous lurking in the depths. Finally, his fingers brushed against the rocky shore, and he pulled himself up onto the island, collapsing in exhaustion.

He didn’t allow himself long to recoup, not trusting at the island’s safety.

It was only ten paces across, its surface covered in the same glowing moss as if a carpet. A wall of weaving roots created a sort of fencing around edges where root and rock met water.

At the center of the island, on a supernatural throne made of curving roots and moss, a dead man sat with a dagger embedded in his skull.

The man had to have been dead for months, his skin tightening across his skull as moisture left his body. It reminded Samuel of Oscar’s magic. The slower, natural, process of life breaking down into death.

Samuel examined the hilt of dagger protruding from the man’s head. It was made of dark wood and adorned with intricate etchings, depicting shadowy figures in a dance of death. Samuel looked around himself, feeling like a kid about to try and lift candy from a supermarket, and wiped his wet hands on even wetter clothes.

A tiny voice at the back of his mind warned him that this was a bad idea, that he had no idea what the consequences of pulling the knife free would be, but Samuel was too tired to listen.

He gripped the hilt and pulled the blade free from the man’s skull. It scraped and caught at the end. Samuel yanked again and the man’s neck snapped. The head dropped away from the knife still in Samuel’s hand.

Samuel watched in mute horror as the head tumbled forward off the body and rolled off his lap, bouncing across the floor until splashing into the water and sinking to the depths below.

“Well, that can’t be good,” Samuel muttered.

Samuel tensed, waiting, and when nothing happened. He relaxed the dagger.

The blade was so dark that it almost felt impossible to look at, crafted from an otherworldly metal and sharp enough to cut with the lightest touch. He tested its weight, carefully weaving it through the air in a series of untrained slashes and stabs. The faster he moved the blade, the more it left behind a trailing mist of dark shadows. It felt perfectly suited to Samuel’s hands. Almost weightless.

He summoned his Player Scroll. The dagger’s description in his inventory had only four words:

[Echoes of Umbra, Legendary]

“Hell yeah,” Samuel said, smiling.

And then the black water of the lake began to ripple.